8 Tips To Optimize Your Category Pages
June 11, 2009 by Tyrone
Today’s video is about optimizing your category products page within your ecommerce business. This is a key component for any ecommerce website and it can make the difference to every sale.
Here are some points that you will take away from this video:
- Allow a customer to auto return after “Adding to Cart”
- Display out-of-stock items separately
- Include an “Add to Cart” button on you category listing page
- Have a sort by option
- Highlight new & sale products
- Show “real life” photos
- Include a search function – Google search
- Make your product images clickable
Tyrone Shum
Category Optimizer
Tips On Creating Excellent Ecommerce Site Navigation
June 9, 2009 by Tyrone
Today’s video is about how to produce excellent site navigation for your ecommerce business. Why is this important? View the video to find out:
How To Convert More Sales From Your Landing Page
June 4, 2009 by Tyrone
Landing pages are usually the first point of contact a visitor reaches. On average you have between 5 – 7 seconds to capture a visitors attention and if they can’t find what they want, they move onto the next website. This is why it is very crucial to be aware of what visitors are looking for. Let’s firstly establish what landing pages are and how they affect your ecommerce business. Then we will look at 5 effective ways to improve your landing pages and lastly you have to test and monitor your results.
What Are Landing Pages?
Copyblogger has a great description of what a landing page is:
A landing page is any page on a website where traffic is sent specifically to prompt a certain action or result. Think of a golf course… a landing page is the putting green that you drive the ball (prospect) to. Once on the green, the goal is to get the ball into the hole. Likewise, the goal of the copy and design of a landing page is to get the prospect to take your desired action.
So where does the landing page fit into your ecommerce store? If you are either doing some form of advertising and driving a campaign to a particular product, then your product page would become your landing page. Alternatively if you have optimised your ecommerce website and getting traffic from search engines then either the front page of your store or some product in your store becomes a landing page. No matter where the traffic comes from, our goal is to make sure each page in your ecommerce store is effective for a visitor to either:
- Leave their details for us to followup with them. (Via a newsletter or contact page)
- A call to action to purchase a product from your store.
Let’s take a look at a few effective ways to improve your landing pages..
Marketing Your E-commerce Business Through Social Media Networks
May 28, 2009 by Tyrone
A popular way to generate traffic to your e-commerce business is through social media networks. You can market your e-commerce website through places such as Digg.com, Twitter.com, Facebook and MySpace. The goal with social network marketing is twofold:
- You are trying to enhance your site’s community by establishing outposts on social networking sites so people who share your interests, or are interested in your products and services, find you and your site.
- Getting involved in social networking multiplies the number of places that your site and your products can be found by search engines, which is critically important to the success of your e-commerce business.
How To Leverage Social Media Networks To Our Advantage?
Simply, we are trying to spread the word about your e-commerce business. You can take your product reviews or blog posts and spread them as far as possible online enlisting the help of these sites. It’s important to make sure the content you’re promoting is interesting and helpful to the audience you’re trying to reach. Remember, people like to do business with their friends if they’ve never met you offline. By being reasonable and participating in social networking, you’ll expand your credibility and potential customer base in many important and helpful ways.
It’s also important to recognize that these social media outlets were designed to serve as conversation platforms, and not as overt marketing channels. Sending messages that are overly promotional or commercial is often compared to shouting at a party where everyone else is chatting quietly, and the backlash can overwhelm the benefits of participation. As an ecommerce business owner I recommend taking a couple of weeks to monitor the various sites to get a sense of the patterns and informal rules before posting anything.
How To Setup An Ecommerce Internet Business Website?
May 11, 2009 by Tyrone
Lately I’ve been reading through some e-commerce forums and I have noticed a lot of beginners asking the same questions. Just like myself, I once was a beginner in starting an e-commerce business and with time and experience I have gained a greater understanding of what is involved. In many ways I wish I had someone there who could show me a simple “how to” setup a successful e-commerce business, which would have saved a lot of the countless hours. Luckily for you, you won’t need to spend more time trying to search the information as I am going to give you a step by step guide on how to setup your own e-commerce website over a course spanning a few weeks. I will link everything back to this post when this course is finished.
Firstly, the assumption I am going to make is that you are looking to install an open source software. The one I recommend is Magento Commerce, which is an extremely powerful platform to use for any e-commerce business. If you want to see why I recommend this software, please read my review: Magento Commerce Review.
Here is an outline of what you will learn:
- Choosing your e-commerce business domain name
- Finding a reliable hosting service to host your e-commerce website
- Setup your domain name to redirect to your hosting provider
- Preparing your site for a pre-launch
- Uploading and installing Magento Commerce on the hosting server
- Setup your email servers using Gmail
- Configure Magento Commerce with SEO optimization add-on
- Which pages to include on your e-commerce website – about us, contact us, privacy policies, shipping and returns policy, etc.
- Uploading your products images and descriptions to appeal to your customers
- Launching your e-commerce website
By the end of this course you will be able to setup your own e-commerce website and start to see profits. If there is anything that I may not have covered, please leave your comments below and I’ll add it to this course. Any feedback is appreciated.
Tyrone Shum
E-commerce Resource Guide
